Duolingo

Duolingo is the world’s leading language education platform. Powered by machine learning, Duolingo adapts content to a user’s proficiency in order to create an effective and efficient learning experience.
Website

Working with CapitalG

“CapitalG goes above and beyond to help the Duolingo team. They regularly and proactively provide us with insights on overcoming existing obstacles, and help us to strategically think through long-term goals and opportunities.”

Gina Gotthilf, VP of Growth

Advice for Entrepreneurs

“Only hire the best people. Never compromise.”

Luis von Ahn, CEO and Co-Founder

About Duolingo

“Globally, the main reason for learning a new languages is to find better job opportunities, but learning languages also used to be prohibitively costly to most. With Duolingo, everyone, from poorest to richest, can learn languages. When money can't buy a better education, that's educational equality.”

Luis von Ahn, CEO and Co-Founder

Duolingo's Growth Story

Duolingo was created by MacArthur Fellow, Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and professor at Carnegie Mellon, and his PhD student Severin Hacker. Luis was born in Guatemala, where most people don’t have access to the education they would need for a chance to get out of poverty. In particular, while language education has the power of doubling one’s income potential, it has historically been inaccessible to most.

The co-founders decided to dedicate themselves to help solve this problem by providing the best and most innovative language education to everyone, for free. It would be based on science and data to guarantee effective results, with a gamified feel to motivate even the most busy of its students. And so Duolingo was born.

Three years later, through word of mouth alone, over 100 million people learn languages on Duolingo and governments are using it to improve language education in their public schools.